Entourage or Mail?

I got Office Mac 2004 on the cheap (MS's Home User Programme) and I'm after some opinions on Entourage. I am a long time user of Outlook (have it at work) but I am quite happy with Mail on the iMac (it's basic but it seems reliable).

How does Entourage compare with Outlook. Outlook has issues and is slower than **** - the more mail I kept the slower it got but I imported all 30,000 emails into Mail and Mail hasn't skipped a beat.

Just looking for opinions to judge whether I shoudl consider switching from Mail or not.

I got Office Mac 2004 on the cheap (MS's Home User Programme) and I'm after some opinions on Entourage. I am a long time user of Outlook (have it at work) but I am quite happy with Mail on the iMac (it's basic but it seems reliable).

How does Entourage compare with Outlook. Outlook has issues and is slower than **** - the more mail I kept the slower it got but I imported all 30,000 emails into Mail and Mail hasn't skipped a beat.

Just looking for opinions to judge whether I shoudl consider switching from Mail or not.

Cheers

Keep using Mail, Entourage needs more work. It uses one large data file to keep all your emails stored. If you use Time Machine it will become a problem in a hurry because one new email will cause Time Machine to backup the entire data file again rather than just the new email. The backup will be slow and use much more HDD space. Mail on the other hand stores the new emails individually and Time Machine can backup only the new ones with much less time/space involved.

My experience with Entourage 2004 is that it's slow. 2008 Entourage is much better but is still buggy and crashes a lot while still having the same drawbacks with the data file. M$ also chose not to add new features that are now standard in Mail. The only advantage that Entourage 2008 has over Mail that I'm aware of is the ability to connect with M$ Exchange Server.

I agree with hndcvcboi's advice, but I actually wonder if you are asking the right question. Entourage and Outlook really shouldn't be compared directly. IMHO, Entourage is a lot closer to Outlook Express than to Outlook. Being used to Outlook helps when you play with Entourage, but Entourage is its own animal.

When I got my Mac, I also got MS Office 2004 and so had Entourage as part of that. I played with Entourage, Mail and Thunderbird. I settled on Thunderbird in the end because it seemed more feature rich and it uses industry standard MBX format for its mail, which means that you can easily change email clients to any other MBX based client (there are lots of those out there).

Finally, Thunderbird is multi platform, which means the same set of mail files can be moved to Windows or Linux and work just fine. In essence, Thunderbird allows you to have completely platform independent email. If you use Mail, you are using a very platform dependent email solution. This is not necessarily a bad thing if you plan to use Macs forever, but I just like the idea that Thunderbird allows me the complete flexibility to run my email from any platform I want.

With the advent of Leopard, and some clever new capabilities on Mail, I am going to have to revisit this decision though and see if it still holds. For now I am staying with Thunderbird though.

Excellent advice from all the above. I can't over-emphasize what hndcvcboi said about Entourage's single database. If you get one new silly email joke that database will be modified, and if it is 4 megs or 4 gigs the entire thing will be backed up. And if (when) it gets corrupted you run the risk of losing all your email, addresses, everything.